by Pam Jenoff
On the last step she stumbled, and the banging of her shoes as she recovered echoed through the stairway. Above a door opened and she heard footsteps. “Anneke,” Henryk said breathlessly, appearing on the landing above.
The top three buttons of his shirt were undone, she noticed as he walked down the stairs toward her. She bit her lip, fighting the urge to demand answers about the girl. “I went to the Wall, but you didn’t show,” she said. “So I came looking for you here.” Why did she feel the need to justify her actions after what he had done?
“I was running late,” he replied, and the explanation was so inadequate she almost laughed aloud.
“We should go,” she said, focusing on Paris and all of the things that lay ahead. “Are you ready now?”
He looked away. “Anneke,” he repeated and his breathing was calmer now, his tone solemn.
“What is it?”
“I can’t.”
Her feet seemed to slip from beneath her and she leaned against the wall so as not topple. “My father, he found out and he’s stopping me—”
“In a few weeks then, maybe,” she said stubbornly. “After he’s no longer watching.” But even as she spoke she knew that there was more to it than that.
“It’s not just that. My friend,” she could tell instantly from the catch in his voice that he was not talking about one of the other boys from the café but of the dark-haired girl in the flat. “My friend thinks I should return to the university and my father has offered to pay my living expenses if I start this term.”
He continued speaking, but she could barely hear him over the buzzing in her ears. “I’m sorry, Anneke.” She watched in disbelief as he turned and started to climb the stairs. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t made her way to the flat. Would he have even bothered to leave the company of the dark-haired girl to come and tell Anneke he wasn’t going, or would she still be standing alone on the darkened street corner waiting?
What now? She could dump the clock and go home and act as though nothing had happened. But it was too late for that. She found herself thinking of Scarlett O’Hara—what would her favorite heroine have done in this situation?
Go anyway, a voice not her own seemed to say. She hesitated, taken aback by the idea. Well, why not? She could make her way to the break in the Wall. She didn’t have Henryk’s contacts on the other side, but she would manage somehow.
“Wait,” she called after him. He turned back reluctantly. “How—I mean, if one was going to go?”
A look of disbelief crossed his face and for a moment she thought he might refuse to give her the information. But then his expression turned to resignation. “Down the street from the munitions factory, about a quarter mile south across from a butcher shop there’s a gap in the Wall. If you can get over, there’s a van that passes by that can take you out of the city for a price.”
“But the area by the munitions factory is a huge construction site. There are lights, hundreds of workers.”
“It’s nearly impossible,” he conceded with a detachment that confirmed the mission was no longer his own. “But perhaps farther down it won’t be so conspicuous.” She glimpsed fear in his eyes then and knew that his decision not to go had nothing to do with returning to the university.
This time, she did not wait for him to turn away. “Good-bye, Henryk,” she said, taking in his shrunken form. The breath beneath her words seemed to extinguish the last tiny flicker of what she had felt for him.
She walked from the building and started down the street, moving as swiftly as she could while carrying the rucksack. She didn’t know what time the van would pass by, but she had surely been delayed from Henryk’s original timetable by the detour to the flat. She looked over her shoulder, wondering if she should go back and ask. But there was no time and this was her journey now.
When she reached the Wall, she continued down the street, finding the butcher shop he had referenced. She looked at the Wall across from it but it appeared solid. Her heart sank. Had Henryk been misinformed?
Then a few feet down the road she saw it, a gap in the Wall where the concrete was missing—whether it had been broken or was not filled in yet she did not know—and a tangle of thick barbed wire was all that remained. She hurried to it. Closer now, she could see that it was hardly the break Henryk had been promised—a notch, cut out of the top of the Wall, not more than ten inches wide. It was several feet off the ground, and she had to find a foothold to reach it. How much easier it would have been if there had been two of them, one hoisted over first who could then reach back to help the other. A pang of regret shot through her. But there was no time to think about that now.
Taking a deep breath, she reached up and secured one foot in a small niche in the Wall. She looked at her rucksack, hesitating. It would be hard enough to climb over with two hands, much less with one tied up holding the bag. But she did not dare throw it over for fear of damaging the clock. She climbed up into the crevice, sliding one leg over the Wall, grimacing as she felt her tights rip. On the other side, there was a wide chasm, separating east from west. In that moment, she understood for the first time the distance she had to travel, the difficulty of the road ahead.
A light shone up at her suddenly. “Halt!” The police, she panicked. How had they found her so quickly? Had Henryk told? No, there would have been nothing in it for him. Perhaps he had shared his plan with the girl at the flat, or maybe Bronia had become suspicious and summoned her government friend.
She struggled without success to pull her other leg over but she was stuck in the crevice, unable to move. A shot rang out and a bullet whizzed past, missing her shoulder by inches. They really meant to stop her at any cost. Desperately, she tugged herself loose, hurling herself toward the other side. There was another shot and something struck her, sending her lurching forward. I’m hit, she realized, though she felt no pain. She gave another tug and, still clutching the bag, fell into the darkness below.
Thirteen
LAKE COMO, 2009
“So she’s a nun?” Charlotte asked a few hours later as the car raced south toward the Swiss–Italian border. She tried not to watch the road or notice the speed with which Brian pushed the rented Fiat around the terrifying alpine curves.
Brian nodded, not taking his eyes from the road. “Her name is Anastasia Darien, and she’s at a convent just south of Lake Como.”
“Did she say what she knew?” Charlotte pressed, for what seemed like the tenth time.
“No, like I told you, just that she had information that might help with Roger’s defense.”
“And she wouldn’t discuss it over the phone?” Jack asked from the backseat.
Brian raised an eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “Would we be driving all night if she had?”
“True,” Jack relented. At the sound of his voice, conflict washed over Charlotte. She half wished she was sitting in the back with him, watching his profile, close enough to feel his warmth. Partly, though, she was relieved—their last conversation, interrupted by Brian, had not ended well. She didn’t want to see a different look in his eyes than the one that had given her butterflies every time he had glanced her way for the past several days.
“Of course, she could just be a complete fraud,” Jack added grimly. After Brian had come to Charlotte excitedly with the news, they’d called Jack, who returned quickly to the hotel. Despite the late hour, he had on the same clothes he was wearing earlier and Charlotte had wondered if he’d ever gone to bed. At the door to her room, he’d hesitated and she knew he was thinking of their night together.
Jack had been the most skeptical of the three about making the trek to Italy, and Charlotte had braced herself for a repeat of the debate over whether to travel to Salzburg. But things were different now—with Roger defeated by the news of Magda’s death, there were few other leads to pursue, so Jack had quickly acquiesced to the trip. But now his cynicism seemed to return. “We get phone calls like that all the time, false t
ips.”
Brian shifted gears as they descended a hill. “To what end?”
Charlotte could hear the shrug in Jack’s voice. “Attention seekers, mostly. People read about a high-profile case in the paper and they want to be part of it. Or they think there’s some sort of money involved, like a reward.”
“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Brian replied, as they neared the border crossing. A guard stuck his head out of a small building and waved them through. On the other side, the terrain became steeper and the sky paled slightly behind them in a way that suggested morning was near.
They traveled in silence for some time, the predawn hush broken only by the whirring of the engine. Finally, they climbed another peak and as they cleared a cluster of trees, daylight broke, revealing a valley below. “That’s it,” Brian announced, pointing.
Even shrouded in dimness, the view was breathtaking. Kaletni Monastery sat nestled in a bluff covered with brightly colored autumn leaves, overlooking a massive expanse of water. It was a large medieval structure, a red-roofed chapel surrounded by a series of smaller buildings with arched windows hewn crudely from sandstone.
The road wound downward, depositing them at the monastery gates. There was no intercom or guard and Charlotte wondered how anyone might know they had arrived. But a moment later a nun shuffled toward them.
Brian rolled down the window. “We’re here to see Sister Anastasia.” Charlotte held her breath, half expecting the nun to deny them entrance. The woman seemed neither surprised nor troubled by the unannounced visitors before dawn, though, opening the gate and waving them inside. Brian pulled onto the patch of gravel she indicated.
Charlotte stepped out of the car, breathing the crisp morning air as she took in the panorama below once more. A breeze blew gently, sending the waters lapping against the rocks. There was little time to marvel, though—Jack and Brian were already following the nun down a path made of smooth, flat stones toward the high entrance to the monastery. It was Sunday morning, Charlotte noted, trying to get her bearings in relation to the days that had passed since leaving home. But the convent was quiet and still. They passed through a courtyard with a magnificently tended flower garden in the center, its pinks and blues a sharp contrast to the otherwise colorless surroundings.
The nun led them wordlessly down a corridor into a room that Charlotte took to be a dining hall, with long wooden tables pushed to either side. The ancient walls and floor gave off a damp smell.
The woman walked from the room, closing the door behind her, and the three of them stood in awkward silence. In the distance, a bell began to chime. Charlotte gazed out the window at a bird that swooped low over the rolling olive groves on the far side of the lake. What would it be like to live here, to wake up each day in such tranquil surroundings?
Suddenly aware of someone watching her, Charlotte lifted her head, her eyes meeting Jack’s. She expected him to look away, but his gaze met hers, held. Her breath caught. Her mind spun back to the story Jack recounted of seeing her for the first time years ago. If she had looked up and noticed him, would it have been like this?
She shivered involuntarily, then wrapped her arms around herself against the chill. “Here,” Jack said, coming up beside her and draping his jacket around her shoulders.
She hesitated, caught off guard by the intimate, unexpected gesture. “Thanks. It’s colder in here than outside.”
Behind her, Charlotte heard a scuffling noise and the three of them spun toward it in unison. There was someone else in the room, she noticed then, a woman wearing a plain gray dress that blended into the granite wall behind her, which had made her almost undetectable when she had been motionless. She stood facing away from them, looking out the window. Her hair was covered in matching gray cloth, a simpler version of the habit that the nun who escorted them in had worn.
“Hello?” Charlotte said uncertainly. The woman turned toward them and as her face became illuminated in the pale light, Charlotte gasped. She knew then exactly who the woman was and why she would indeed be able to help Roger, if anyone could. For though the habit obscured her hair and her face was lined with age, the features were unmistakable.
She studied the woman with disbelief, as though seeing a ghost. “Magda?”
The woman shook her head slightly, her faint smile almost imperceptible. No, of course she wasn’t. Magda had died in the camps. And Magda would have been Roger’s age, even a few years older maybe. The statuesque woman who stood before them, beautiful even in nun’s clothing, could not have been much more than sixty-five. But the wide cheeks and dark eyes were almost an exact replica of the images she had seen of Magda. Except for the dimpled chin, which was pure Roger.
“Anna?” Charlotte tried again, taking a step forward. “Anna Dykmans?”
The woman blanched slightly, as though stung by the name. “Yes, I was once called Anna. I go by Anastasia now.”
Charlotte’s mind raced. Magda and Anna had died in Belzec. So how was it possible that she was standing here before them?
No, she realized. Anna had not died. Magda had died in Belzec and the presumption had been that a child as young as Anna would have perished along with her mother. She remembered Roger’s account of a rumor that a girl had escaped. Roger had assumed through his haze of desperation and hope that by “girl” they had meant a young woman, and he had spent the intervening years searching for Magda. But perhaps the witness really had meant a small child, now the woman standing before them.
“Anastasia,” Charlotte said aloud, processing it. The name bore a hint of Anna, the girl that she had once been. But it was different enough that no one would have linked her to her former life. And the choice was ironic too, Charlotte reflected. Anastasia had been the youngest daughter of the Russian czar Nicholas, and the legend persisted that she had escaped the execution of the royal family by the Bolsheviks and was living somewhere under an assumed identity. Risen from the ashes, as the woman standing before them seemed to be. “But you were Anna Dykmans?”
“Yes. Darien is my married surname.”
Married, Charlotte reflected. So the woman hadn’t been in the convent her entire life. What would prompt one to give up the outside world and retreat here? Charlotte thought of her own flight to Philadelphia after the pain of her mother’s death and Brian’s betrayal. Perhaps vows of solitude weren’t such a strange idea after all.
“You are wondering,” Anastasia said in broken English, “how it is that I am alive? There are a great many answers to that question: fate, luck, the goodwill of strangers, some of whom died as a result of their selflessness …” She drifted off, as though lost in her memories.
“How did you escape the camps?” Charlotte prompted gently.
The woman looked up at her, eyes clearing. “Oh, I was never in the camps. When my mother heard the Nazis coming to our door, she somehow got me to our neighbors, the Baders. They were known as people who had helped Jews.”
Charlotte tried to process the information. The whole time Roger had been searching for Magda and Anna, the child had been so close by. In fact, when he had gone to the Baders to ask if they had seen anything, Anna would have been right there. Why hadn’t they returned the child to him, or at least let him know that she was there? Were they doing what they thought best to protect Anna, or had they simply been too afraid?
So Magda had been able to spirit Anna away before her arrest. Of course, the Nazis would have known that Magda had a child, would have demanded her whereabouts. But Magda surely had not given up that information and she had paid with her life.
“The Baders were good people, but ultimately the Nazis grew wise to their ways and came back for them. We were all arrested and sent to a detention center.” The older woman shuddered “From there we were put on a truck headed to one of the camps. But before we reached our destination, Frau Bader pushed me off the truck into the woods. I don’t know how she expected me to survive. You can imagine the odds.” Charlotte nodded. A young child, a
lone in the forest. She might have starved or been picked up by the Nazis or someone sympathetic to them. “A couple found me and hid me until after the war.”
She continued, “It wasn’t one of those fairy tales you hear about these days, the family adopting the little child and raising her as their own. They kept me in the cellar and when food was scarce, I was the one who went without. It was a nightmare and I sometimes wished I was in the camp with the Baders.” Anastasia’s voice trailed off and Charlotte found herself curious and relieved in equal parts when the older woman did not say more about her experiences in hiding. “After the war, they deposited me at a displaced persons camp. A woman in East Berlin took me in exchange for a modest government stipend that was being offered to anyone who would care for children.
“Of course, I never knew most of this. I was less than two years old when I lost my mother and my memories were hazy, soon obscured by time. The woman in Berlin who raised me, Bronia she was called, became the only mother I had ever known. Then, when I was older, I was able to escape over the Wall and flee to the West.”
“Have you been a nun ever since?” Brian interjected and Charlotte cringed inwardly, hoping his outburst would not stop Anastasia from speaking freely.
But she shook her head and continued. “I married and lived in London for a time. But I never really felt at home in the outside world. So after my husband died, I made my way here. You must think it strange, my being in a convent when my birth mother was Jewish—my stepmother, Bronia, as well. But after I fled Berlin, I was taken in by some nuns in the south of France and it was there that for the first time I found peace. At the time, I didn’t know that this would be my calling so I went out into the world.”
“How did you find out?” Charlotte asked. “About your real family, I mean.”
“Right before I left Berlin, Bronia said something that made me wonder about my childhood. My curiosity grew over time, and years later, well after the Iron Curtain fell, I returned to the East to do some digging. I found Bronia’s adoption file and the records from the displaced persons camp, and ultimately even the documents where the Nazis had registered me with the Baders at the time of our arrest.” Watching the woman’s face, Charlotte could imagine her search for answers, finding the documents that chronicled her own history of tragedy and suffering. “Finally, I was able to discover my real family in Breslau. There was nothing there anymore, of course; the house had long since been expropriated, first by the Nazis and later by the Communists. But I learned that my mother perished in the camps.”